The City of Newberg is a fast growing community and has the distinction being the gateway to both Oregon’s prized wine country and the largest metro area in the State. The City has balanced its growth and retained a sense of community for its more than 20,000 citizens. While all City departments are working hard to accommodate this growth, Public Works, IT, and Police appear to share a disproportionate amount of the demands. For this reason the City employs technology solutions to help streamline business and improve efficiency and business intelligence.
The City recognizes the benefits of advancing its GIS program and augmenting its existing business solutions with GIS. To assist in this effort the City selected GeoNorth LLC, a GIS consulting firm, to help facilitate this process and develop a GIS Situational Assessment Report. While not a formal GIS needs assessment or implementation plan, this report explored some of the business limitations currently experienced, identifies recommendations and action items, and provides preliminary cost estimates for implementing recommendations.
GeoNorth worked with Public Works Department to complete a GIS situational assessment. The project consisted of reviewing current spatial data and supporting hardware, software, network, applications, and skills. GeoNorth met with key Public Works staff to identify GIS related business processes or those business processes that can be supported or augmented with GIS. GeoNorth evaluated the City’s Permit System (Tidemark), maintenance management system (Cartegraph), and customer billing system (Springbrook) for potential integration with GIS. GeoNorth also provided assistance with the implementation of ArcIMS.
The GIS Situational Assessment Report GeoNorth provided to the City included a series of prioritized recommendations and estimated budgets to formalize GIS at the City. Recommendations were also provided to improve IT infrastructure, staffing requirements, data management, and integration with other business data.
The GIS Situational Assessment Recommendations Report was well received by City management. The City is currently using the Report as a planning tool to outline subsequent tasks and for budgeting purposes. Based on actions taken by the City, it is anticipated that a number of benefits will be realized by reducing data and application redundancy, improving information management, and reducing overall staff time.
